Before identifying clusters corresponding to interstripes, the first step is determining the number of interstripe features. To account for gold bridges connecting broken stripes, McGuirl et al's method [1]} clusters \(X^\text{d}\)  cells into \(N_\text{cl} = 3\)  groups when a pattern has no breaks in black stripes; \(N_\text{cl}= 2\)  groups when the pattern has one broken stripe; and \(N_\text{cl}= 1\)  group otherwise. Our observations suggest that the models [2]}, [3]} are meant to produce patterns with two stripes and three interstripes at the stage that we quantify. Similar to [1]}, we thus consider a pattern to contain one broken stripe when the number of stripes (from the perspective of \(X^\ell \)  or \(M\)  cells—or from the perspective of both) is one; see Eqns. (REF ) and (REF ). As a book-keeping step, we also sort our matrix of cell coordinates by their \(x\) -coordinates before performing any clustering. Having cell coordinates in order based on their position from the left to right boundary of the domain is convenient later in Step 5 (§REF ).
